Which benchmarking data did you use to fall in love?

Did you fall in love after reading case studies and using benchmarking data? Did you see the Mona Lisa in The Louvre, or Picasso’s Guernica in Reina Sofia in Madrid?

Did you give Leonardo a 5 star? Picasso a 4, because the painting is to messy?

Did you go to the concert, for that Beethoven’s 9th? Did you leave a feed back form with your views that the fifth movement is too loud and the second a bit slow and boring? Did you advise the conductor to next time compress the five movements into the top three, please?

How do you rate a sunset, 1 to 10? The ocean, loud or not, in a decibels scale?

The litany of absurd measurements could continue. I have written hours ago about the tyranny of tripadvisorization of life. The obsession with feed back. The ludicrousness of measuring the irrelevant. The stupidity of measuring what is in front to measure and can be measured, for the only reason of its mesure-ability.

I imagine you can gather that I am not ‘anti-measurement’. I am anti-noise. Good, rigorous, needed, crucial, inescapable measuring gets clouded by the tsunami of unnecessary ‘measures’ and data points that we gather in organizational life. When one is confronted with an overwhelming Mother of all Dashboards (or even worse, the constant dripping of ‘measures’) there is no way to distinguish signal and noise.

The next real, good, relevant, perhaps game changing piece of insight comes accompanied by a myriad of spurious, easy to get, attention grabbing ‘data’.

I am sorry to say that distinguishing noise and signal comes with practice. Becoming a connoisseur of the truth and the relevant comes from their relentless praxis.

But a way to start is to at least question the need for those KPIs and ‘hard data outcomes’ that nobody have ever questioned. By polishing and refining and discarding lots of them, you’ll get closer to the ones that really mean something.

PS: also, start with insights (‘hey, what is new in the customer side?’) then get to the spreadsheet.